Absorb it all and hope for the best

The computer systems in the hangar were isolated from the rest of the base. Even their power supply was separate, as they used a miniature fusion reactor.

An analysis of the data in the computers confirmed that essentially no progress had been made in figuring out how the alien ships worked. Only the most superficial scans had been conducted, apparently for fear that anything more could trigger a reaction with unpredictable consequences.

As the old saying went, though, fortune favours the bold. And you were the product of the boldest research program in human history.

Even so, a degree of caution was warranted. Your exosuit plated you completely, your nanite-slime increasing your density as much as possible. Not needing the computer systems, you tapped directly into the fusion reactor, draining it until within minutes it was just an inert lump of iron-56, converting all the energy into yet more nanite-slime.

Maybe what you were about to do would have devastating consequences, and maybe you'd be wracked with survivor's guilt for doing it, but you were pretty sure you'd survive, at least.

Letting a single nanite, encased in a drop of slime, out of yourself, you sent it toward one of the smaller ships that you guessed was more likely a research vessel than a battleship.

You frowned. The nanite scurried all over the hull. It was as if the entire thing were a single piece, probably hollowed out given its mass, but you couldn't detect anything that might be a port of entry.

You couldn't even **** a way in. There was some sort of shielding preventing the nanite from drilling through the hull.

That left two options that you could see. Three, really, but one was to give up entirely, which you weren't willing to consider.

The first option was to leave for the time being. You had complete control of the base, so you had nothing to fear on that account. If anyone new arrived, they would be under your control almost immediately. Any surveillance would show nothing out of the ordinary, so your sabotage was thoroughly undetectable.

If you did that, you'd take a trip to King Enterprises headquarters. You had no idea what Emilia King might have, but it was possible there was something there that could help you get inside these ships.

It was even possible there was something there that would make it unnecessary to get inside the ships.

The second option was the riskier one, but it would pay off immediately if it worked, and if Ms. King turned up empty, you'd have to do it anyway.

There was, therefore, no point putting it off that you could see. You were here, after all, and you didn't want to have gone through all the trouble for nothing.

The nanite-slime buzzed with energy as you activated its built-in Phase Binder, expanding its range to encompass the entire ship it had failed to infiltrate by more conventional methods.

You hadn't wanted to try it. Mundane methods of attempting to **** entry were dangerous enough; mixing near-magical technology with something of unknown provenance was a recipe for disaster.

But fortune was smiling most favorably on the boldest.

Instantly you had access to the entire ship. It had become an extension of yourself, and consequently, despite the complete unfamiliarity of its systems, you understood it, everything about it, at a purely instinctual level.

The records translated themselves as language interpreters identified words with common meanings and extrapolated the rest from context. Systems flared to life as energy coursed through circuits.

The ship had been part of a fleet sent to study intelligent life on the planet (amusingly, from a far distance, it had identified exactly one such species, a marine one), determine its suitability for colonisation, and if necessary, eradicate the native population and terraform the planet. As with so much else you'd encountered over the last little while, the technology employed further threw into question any conventional understanding of physics.

Even as you'd been absorbing data from the first ship, more nanite-slime had made its way into the other elements of the fleet, more records becoming available to you. One by one each and every ship became nothing more than an extension of your ever-growing mind.

The aliens who'd crewed the ships knew that Earth had no defence against orbital bombardment. It wasn't even correct to call it "bombardment"; the weaponry employed in these vessels selectively reduced matter to its component subatomic particles. It would only have taken a matter of minutes for every single human on the planet to be worse than dead while leaving everything else untouched.

What they hadn't reckoned with was, hilariously, a variation on an ancient comic-book trope.

For some reason, the exact mix of radiation emitted by Sol, while it produced some undesirable effects in humans, was swiftly lethal to the would-be invaders.

They'd had barely enough time to trigger an emergency jump, hollowing out a random cavern beneath the surface of Earth and moving their entire fleet into it in hopes that the ground above would block enough of the radiation for some of them to survive and figure out how to proceed with their mission.

Instead, all it did was leave them to die a slower ****.

When you finally opened a ship and walked inside, the scene was gruesomely macabre. You had to erase your olfactory functions and even then the sights alone almost made you retch.

But these were beings who had been on a mission of merciless genocide. You had no pity for them.

You had continued to fuse yourself with the ships, bringing under your control every bit of seemingly supernatural technology on them. Perfect invisibility. Intangibility. True antigravity. The list went on.

The power source for the ships was a proper perpetual motion machine. Given that Hideki's bike was truly frictionless--you knew that there was not even any experimental error to consider now that it was a part of you--you knew such a machine was theoretically possible, but an endless, inexhaustible source of energy was something you swiftly integrated into every single part of you.

With the reach you'd already attained through your nanite-slime, some of the other technology you'd integrated was enough to terrify you. The records had already informed you of the selective matter disassembly--the ships had a full loadout of more conventional weaponry, but it was generally not regarded as necessary--but if anything, the main terraforming tool was even more frightening.

The aliens didn't need to do anything like wipe out native life and repopulate planets with their own flora and fauna. Such a process took significant time, and settlers would have to come in a second wave of ships. So they had instead come up with a matter reorganizer, which allowed them to alter a planet's biosphere from its native state to one designed precisely to their specifications.

It worked on far smaller--and, in theory, larger--scales, too. Some salacious entertainments you found in the system showed that it was often used recreationally for pleasurable purposes.

When you were certain that everything the ships could possibly offer you had been integrated fully, you turned their own weaponry on the fleet. The matter was swiftly disassembled and reassembled into yet more nanite-slime. Not that you needed any more, really; the perpetual-motion machines allowed the stuff to infinitely self-replicate. But it prevented anyone else from getting their hands on the fleet, and it was the final indignity inflicted on a group of would-be mass murderers.

The base no longer served any purpose, of course. With the fleet gone, it would be repurposed or, more likely, decommissioned. It was not located in an especially strategic position, as that hadn't been a factor the aliens had considered when selecting a site for their emergency hideaway. The officers in command would no doubt be court-martialed, while those serving under them would carry a mysterious black mark on their records.

As with so much else you'd done, it wasn't their fault. If anyone should bear the consequences, it would be you, but you knew already that you were, for all practical purposes, above consequences. The only being who could possibly harm you was yourself.

So using the aliens' sensor technology, which allowed near-instantaneous monitoring of everything on the planet, you decided to keep a figurative eye on matters. You might not suffer for your actions, but you would make sure nobody else did, either.

Unleashing the matter rearranger, you restored what little damage you'd done to the base. Maybe the military would find a use for it; you didn't know. What you did know is that you no longer needed to be there, so you activated the personal teleporter you'd found and vanished.

Your next stop was, of course, King Enterprises, but now that travel time was no longer a necessary consideration for you, you decided to make a stop at your lab at Hideki's headquarters. You weren't there for much more than you already had. Maybe it was petty, but you were determined that you, and only you, would have access to anything that might override reality as commonly understood, at least on Earth. You thought about someday going to space, but even with the faster-than-light travel and communication capabilities absorbed from the extraterrestrial fleet, that would still take time. Better to exhaust Earth's resources first.

The only thing Hideki had left to offer was the Ascend. At this point it was a harmless toy, comparatively speaking, but even a small thing like that could lead to unpredictable breakthroughs. So just as you had with so much else, you stole the prototype, altered the records, and integrated it into yourself. There wasn't really anything it could do that you couldn't already do. Even its ability to merge consciousnesses was something you could already simulate thanks to instantaneous communication between molecules of nanite-slime.

With that done, you trained your thoughts on King Enterprises. Emilia King was visiting the warehouse where she stored the artifacts the archaeological surveys she funded had found. She was making careful visual analyses, being careful not to touch anything. There was a plaque on the wall at which she studiously avoided looking; given the resemblance of the person portrayed on it to herself, you guessed it was her father or grandfather. The inscription indicated that he'd died in some horrible accident sparked by a lack of sufficient caution involving one of the earliest artifacts to join the collection.

That explained why Emilia herself, despite her overwhelming curiosity, refused to touch the things. Which was just fine, as far as you were concerned. If she wasn't going to handle them, if she wasn't going to take the risk, you were more than happy to do it.

Moments later, your office was empty again.